PARTISAN REVIEW
345
Chomsky's conception of the social sciences is not likely to flourish
in a society in which the political and economic pressures on the social
sciences are enormous, and push in the direction of producing mechan–
isms of control that can be used for the exploitation of the many by a
self-appointed few. His views cannot be captured by catchy slogans; and
this alone should encourage further study of his work. The development
of some of the ideas sketched here is necessary to any framework within
which we can explain reason, self-knowledge and the way in which the
combination of science and the humanities can lead at least to a partial
comprehension of both.
J.
M. E.
Morav(sik
IN DREAMS BEGIN
NATHANAEL WEST: THE ART OF HIS LIFE. By Jay Martin. Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux. $10.00.
There are writers whose work oonstitutes an antibiography–
an obliquity, a false swearing; but Nathanael West's life kept pace
with his books, in a kind of race to disaster. Like the diminutive creatures
running amok in the mazes of his plots, all terribly shrunken from a
full humanity, West himself was - as his brother-in-law S.
J.
Perelman
said - "only eighteen inches high . . . very sensitive [and] somewhat
savage." His ego was a festering blister, and in a doomed, recurrent
effort, he lied to soothe it. Everything he said, everything he did, West
gilded, for both himself and others, with fantasy - even changing his
name from plain Nathan Weinstein to Nathaniel von Wallenstein Wein–
stein, before hiding from his Eastern European heritage altogether be–
hind the name of a famous American mariner, Nathaniel West. In his
fiction a relentless diagnostician of the daydream, West was in his life a
textbook example of the disease. And for this West blamed himself no
more than he finally blamed his characters - after all, he seemed to
say, life gives us nothing; let the ego wear the emperor's clothes for a day.
Like his fiction, moreover, West's own story is marked by a savage
series of disappointments. In each not only is nothing given, but what
might have been given is held out, then snatched away: the overwhelm–
ing character of life is, in both, a nasty baiting. In his third novel,
A Cool Million,
West popped open the Horatio Alger lie of an America
of fair play and opportunity to show the pain and corruption insida;
but every novelist is a hero out of Alger, Fame and Truth his land of
opportunity, and West wanted large sales, a name with bells on it, suc-
